Nissan cuts electric car battery charging time to 10 minutes

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Electric cars that can travel hundreds of miles on a single charge are starting to appear, but they still have a number of major hurdles to overcome. They include cost, range, and charging times. Solve any two of those three problems and electric vehicles suddenly become a lot more viable. And it seems Nissan may have solved one already.

Working with Kansai University in Japan, the car manufacturer has managed to get the charging time of a typical electric car battery down from hours to 10 minutes. Although still longer than a typical gas fill up, it brings the time down to a point where you wouldn’t mind stopping on a journey regularly to recharge.

The breakthrough that made such a short charge possible is a simple change of material used for the electrode in the battery capacitor. Typically, carbon is used, but Nissan switched it out for tungsten oxide and vanadium oxide. By doing so, it was possible to greatly improve upon the power transfer to the battery.

By managing to achieve such a short charge time Nissan may have also gone a long way to solving the pricing issue too. As existing batteries take hours to charge you typically need an expensive charger installed at home to fill the battery overnight. But 10 minutes makes a trip to a local gas/electric station viable, so no home charger is needed.

The only bad news about this breakthrough is the time it will take to come to market. We could be waiting a decade before the first 10 minute charge battery makes its way into a vehicle we can buy.